SIREN project

In Italy, the collection of hydro-meteorological data (e.g. river flow, rainfall and temperature measurements) has been managed at the national level by the National Hydrological and Mareographic Service (Servizio Idrografico e Mareografico Nazionale, SIMN) since the early 1900s. The dismantlement of the SIMN, which occurred about 30 years ago, resulted in data collection being transferred to the regional level, consisting of 19 Regions and 2 Autonomous Provinces. This shift has caused difficulties in the availability of complete and homogeneous records for the whole country.
Data acquired in the most recent years is typically available in digital format. Historical measurements are instead often available only in the printed version of the Hydrological Yearbooks published by the National Hydrological and Mareographic Service. In the past, few initiatives attempted to partially recover this information, but they focused on a limited number of years and/or some regions.

Is this lack of data in a digital format a problem?

Yes, definitely! One of the major problems that both hydrologists and climatologists face is the limited amount of historical data that can be used to test new methodologies or train models. This lack of data is even more critical in a country like Italy, with complex morphology and climate that varies substantially across the territory. The recovery of this considerable amount of data would not only allow a better understanding of the climate of the last century but would also serve to estimate how the climate and the hydrological cycle could change in the future.

In other words... we need your help!

Within the SIREN (Saving Italian hydRological mEasuremeNts) project, we aim to recover the historical series of daily river flows and to produce a consistent dataset. We have already collected, classified and selected 15,823 scanned pages of the Hydrological Yearbooks. They contain daily river flow measurement for all available river gauges in Italy from 1916. Now we need your help to digitize them!

Why do we need your help? Why not using optical character recognition software?

Despite the remarkable improvements achieved in recent years by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) softwares and machine learning / artificial intelligence techniques, the most accurate digitization approach is still based on manual transcription. Most of these records are printed in old documents, and the ink may be partially damaged. For example, an "8" can be easily detected as "3" in these conditions. Moreover, these tables contain several hand-written corrections performed by different people, thus, with different calligraphies. All these peculiarities limit the applicability of standardized automatic approaches.

What about the data?

The digitizations will be quality-controlled by our team, and the final dataset will be published with an open access policy. The recovery of this considerable amount of data would not only allow a better understanding of the climate of the last century but would also serve to estimate how the climate and the hydrological cycle could change in the future.

Acknowledgement
IMPETUS is supporting our project. IMPETUS is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101058677. Views and opinions expressed are, however, those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.